In Focus: Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld’s moving body of work “Sweet Earth,” published in 2006, has been on my mind for some time now. In over fifty images, “Sweet Earth” explores sites and communities Sternfeld describes as “experimental utopias in America.” “As the world seemed to turn in unison to hyper-capitalism and large scale urbanism,” Sternfeld writes, “I wanted to point out that there were other models.” I caught up with Sternfeld over the phone while he was at his cabin in Vermont, and asked him to tell me about the genesis of the project and his current work.

“Sweet Earth,” Sternfeld explained, was the first of what he envisions as a four-book cycle, the subsequent installments being “When it Changed,” “Oxbow Archive,” and his most recent book, “iDubai.” Utopic and dystopic aspects of mankind’s activities have been dominant and consistent themes throughout Sternfeld’s work, and in this cycle he draws a link between social models and the environmental implications of our actions.

The title of the second book in the cycle, “When It Changed,” can be read, Sternfeld said, as a continuation of the first: “Sweet Earth, When It Changed.” In this book, Sternfeld documents our descent into a possibly irreversible situation not through photographs of the changing landscape but through the faces of its inhabitants. The series consists of portraits of delegates and attendees at the 11th United Nations Conference on Climate Change, in Montreal, 2005, snapped at the moment “when the horror of what they hear becomes visible on their faces,” the moment when utopia dissolves.

After the harsh realities of the climate-change conference, Sternfeld felt compelled to work on “Oxbow Archive.” Over the course of a year, he photographed a single field in Northampton, Massachusetts, nearly every day. Sternfeld, who said he has always “been deeply engaged in the seasonality and the landscape of New England,” confessed that he had “imagined doing this work as an old man, but after hearing what I heard in Montreal, documenting this field felt urgent, because of the possibility it was going to change radically in the next fifty or one hundred years.”

While doing his research for “When It Changed,” Sternfeld began to believe that “even if we could solve climate change, it would simply allow us to consume the world and the world’s resources in some other way,” and he wanted to make a statement on consumption. This past winter he published “iDubai,” the final book of the cycle. Dubai seemed “a perfect symbolic site for a consuming world,” and what better way to document it, he said, than with the “consumer object du jour,” the iPhone. Sternfeld, who is known for his beautiful 8x10 view camera images, admits that he loves the iPhone palette and its pinhole lens, which creates “little chromatic jewels.”

Here’s a selection of images from all four books. The first two images, from “Sweet Earth,” are followed by Sternfeld’s full accompanying text.